The State of the Dolphin

There are over 1600 people registered for the conference, a record for the conference (this is the 4th year)!

“It’s fun to be a bus driver when the bus is full” says Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL. 1 billion in hte ‘net, 2 billion with a mobile phone, so there’s a lot of connectivity out there. 6.6 billion people in the world, so 15% are online (1 billion). And there are 20 million MySQL downloads per year, with 1/2 that remaining active. So what happens when the online population doubles?

Corporations are doing the same thing consumers are, and adopting for enterprise use. Corporate functions are hosted or put on-premise, because of the consumer experience (ie, google search).

Humans tend to overestimate the short term, and underestimate the long term. The internet has risen slowly since the bubble burst (which was the “hey, the short term isn’t meeting our expectations!”), and we’ve underestimated that.

State of the industry — everyone wants everything online, with people making $$ from subscription-based services. Free and open-sourced software is the fabric of this world (FOSS).

There’s a lot of competition and freedom, which means technology innovation increases, and people are happy because they can follow their passion. We have to defend this freedom, from patents.

To have a successful open source project, you need modularity, so folks can work on a part of a system. This encourages participation, crucial for success.

Pluggable storage engines mean that it’s easy to add storage engines to do what you as an individual needs. No need to recompile to add a new one, just download it, plug it in….and it’s just that easy to remove it too. Of course, you can build your own, too.

Falcon will probably becfome the best general purpose OLTP storage engine.

MySQL has a very active community! Many LAMP startups, many distributors (Dell, Novell and HP), even Oracle has an open source solution.

Awards: yesterday they did community service awards. Applications of the year have been chosen, too, and they are: